The GPU chip is part of the logic board so cannot be upgraded. As others have discussed it is possible to connect an external box via Thunderbolt into which you can fit a standard PCIe vide card. Some software will take advantage of this e.g. DaVinci, Final Cut Pro X, and some will not.
Your MacBook Pro being a 2012 model is now five years old and therefore considerably slower than current models. On top of that it is only an i5 CPU rather than an i7. As you have 16GB you already have the maximum amount of RAM it supports. However I suspect you still have the original hard drive fitted. An option would be to replace this with an SSD drive. This would have to be a SATA III 2.5" SSD drive like the Samsung 850 EVO, this would be much faster than the current hard drive but still a lot slower than the PCI SSD in the latest MacBook Pro.
I would therefore suggest the following three choices in order of preference.
- SSD drive
- Sell it and get a new MacBook Pro
- Thunderbolt external GPU aka eGPU